As part of her job as an on-call neurodiagnostics specialist, Angie commuted within a hundred-mile radius of her home on short notice. It was grueling work. But the nature of the job also meant that she could live almost anywhere she wanted, and now that she and Matt knew Morgan would be remaining at Winnebago indefinitely, they decided to move closer to the hospital. It was finally time to leave Waukesha.
Angie knelt on the carpet of Morgan’s blue bedroom and started packing up her daughter’s things. In the dresser, she found Morgan’s old clothes, children’s size 10–12. Angie held a pair of pants to her chest. They looked tiny. She remembered how small Morgan had been the first time she appeared in handcuffs.
At the new house, movers hauled Morgan’s loft bed, where Anissa and Bella had once slept head-to-foot, to an upstairs bedroom. She stacked the boxes containing Morgan’s old yearbooks and other keepsakes in the closet, shut the door, and blocked it with a cat tree. In the shadow of the loft bed, she set a large, empty cage on the carpet and furnished it with a water dispenser and paper shavings. She would raise baby chicks in Morgan’s new bedroom until they were old enough for the henhouse she was building outside.
Angie and Matt still slept separately. But while his agoraphobia worsened, Angie had resolved to make a fresh start, with or without him. She used the elliptical machine to lose the twenty pounds she’d gained in Morgan’s absence. After more than a decade braving the hustle and bustle of a seventy-thousand-person city, she returned to her roots as a farm girl, planning flowerbeds and a vegetable garden for the new backyard. She pounded stakes into the grass using the same rubber mallet that twelve-year-old Morgan had stashed in her backpack to defend herself against Slenderman. She pickled vegetables and canned fruits for the coming winter. As people back in Waukesha set up the park for Spooka Minooka, Angie searched out new walking trails. She hoped Morgan could walk them with her soon. On Instagram, she posted pictures of herself smiling.
After signing her plea deal, Morgan was transferred from Petersik, Winnebago’s high-security unit, where she’d been living since her suicide attempt in 2016, to Gordon Hall, the lowest-security unit, housed in a one-story structure built in the ranch style in the 1970s to prevent suicide by jumping. Morgan marveled at the unfamiliar pea-green walls and dusty purple window treatments. She’d never seen anything so ugly in her life.
In Gordon Hall, according to doctors’ notes, Morgan “was just getting her feet underneath her,” adjusting to the new unit, and “excited to be there, excited to be moving on to the next phase of treatment.” She still had “flashes,” or flashbacks to the stabbing, which were “disrupting her adapt-to-functioning, her day-to-day functioning.” But the women who lived in Gordon Hall were quieter than residents of Petersik, and Morgan warmed to them immediately, quickly developing what she described as a “following problem,” trailing the other patients as they silently shuffled down the hallways.
When a twenty-one-year-old named Kristin* moved into Morgan’s communal bedroom, Morgan was delighted and followed Kristin all around the ward. She shadowed her all around the unit and back to their bedroom—where Kristin wrapped a cord around her neck and began choking herself. The incident ended with Morgan screaming and orderlies tackling Kristin to the floor.
Afterward, Winnebago moved Morgan to a room by herself. It had three metal lockers and a mirror above the desk with light bulbs around it, like something out of a Hollywood dressing room. Morgan put away her shoebox of nail polish and lay her baby doll on the narrow bed. She wrote a poem.
Shadows encase me as I lie awake
Afraid to snap, afraid to break
I feel the hurt from deep inside
Does no one really hear my cries?
I’m all alone in a world so vast
Wonder: will this day be my last
I saw my friend tie a knot so tight
Look in her eyes, it wasn’t bright
I tried to help, but could I really?
She’s too far gone. Don’t you feel me?
Later on saw her alive—
Why do these girls all want to die?
I want to live, I want to thrive!
Why do these girls all want to die?
When they’re so much better off alive?
One week before Halloween, Dr. Brooke Lundbohm, one of several doctors called upon to testify at Morgan’s sentencing, drove to Winnebago to evaluate Morgan.
Knowing that her conversation with Lundbohm might help dictate the length of her time at Winnebago, Morgan wanted to look nice for their meeting. Lately, she had been experimenting with makeup, mixing lipstick, Chap Stick, and eye shadow to make her eyelids glow in iridescent colors under the hospital’s fluorescent lights. She enjoyed dressing in monochromatic colors like black, or purple, with a purple blouse, purple eye shadow, and purple lipstick to match.
When Dr. Lundbohm saw the amount of makeup Morgan had on, she assumed that Morgan wasn’t taking their meeting seriously. Brushing the matter aside for now, Lundbohm asked Morgan what her plans would be “if she were to be granted conditional release—where would you live?—How would you spend your days?”
Morgan, who had been incarcerated by then for nearly three and a half years, most of which had been spent in a dreamlike state of psychosis, was still in many ways a twelve-year-old. Institutionalization had pressed a pause button on her psychosocial development. She slept with a baby doll and sometimes wore a hat with cat ears on it. She responded to Lundbohm’s question by saying that she wanted to live with her “mommy and daddy” and to “spend the majority of time with her family and her cat.” When Lundbohm asked how Morgan planned to keep track of her mental health, if released back to her family, Morgan said that her mommy would help her.
The plan did not sit well with Lundbohm, who noted, “She indicated a plan to rely upon her mother to notice if her mental health was decompensating, which is concerning given the history where she became quite mentally ill, was acutely symptomatic, up to the index offense, without people closest to her recognizing that her mental health was deteriorating.”
“And what would you do for a job?” Lundbohm asked.
Morgan smiled. “I want to be a writer.”
Morgan already was a writer. Most patients at Winnebago used the unit’s desktop computer (which had no internet) to upload songs to a community folder. But Morgan used it to type up her many novels. Her fiction circled themes that defined her existence. She wrote about kids who inherited something terrible from their fathers. Often, they were trapped in hellish situations, like human experimentation centers or a kidnapper’s basement. But sometimes they found a cat or a kitten in the end and got to keep it, which was the happiest ending Morgan could imagine. She printed her stories on the ward’s printer and stored them in a file folder with Siamese cats nuzzling on the front, a dark sky behind them emblazoned with the aspirational promise ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE. She dreamed of becoming an author of young adult books. She wrote and deleted, wrote and deleted, and deleted. Her favorite key was backspace. She loved to press it, relished in the tap-tap-tap that signaled erasure. Grammatical errors and embarrassing sentences disappeared with a single click. Sometimes Morgan caught herself drumming the delete finger on her knee or on the cafeteria tabletop, tapping at an invisible button that might erase all her mistakes.
Lundbohm told Morgan that writing was an “unrealistic” goal. She seemed disappointed in Morgan for even mentioning it.
Morgan’s smile faded. “I don’t understand what you want me to say.”
“It may not work,” Lundbohm said. “If you are set free from Winnebago. Strangers will recognize your face.”
At this, Morgan began to cry, becoming “overwhelmed, distraught even,” according to Lundbohm’s notes.
“Eventually while discussing some of the issues related to her conditional release, she was crying so hard that she was having difficulty communicating.” Lundbohm gave “Morgan minutes to try to regain her emotional composure.” But ultimately the interview was terminated “because of her distress.”
Morgan’s emotional response to Lundbohm’s denunciation of her hopes and dreams caused Lundbohm to question Morgan’s progress. Surely someone on antipsychotics and antidepressants should be able to handle some “push back,” as Lundbohm later described it.
After his own session with Morgan, Dr. Kent Berney, another court-appointed psychiatrist, disagreed with Lundbohm’s negative outlook. He felt that Morgan’s medication was working wonders. He viewed her periodic crying jags as within the normal bounds of adolescent sensitivity. Morgan had done something unforgivable—certainly something worth feeling depressed about; a less emotional response would indicate insanity. Now that she was no longer in psychosis, it made sense that she would periodically look around herself and weep at the repercussions of a crime she barely remembered committing.
“She still has some periodic visual anomalies which involved seeing some colors,” he noted, but none of the previous visual or auditory hallucinations. Her schizophrenia was “markedly diminished.” After first administering Morgan antipsychotics in December 2015, doctors had gradually increased her dosages until her hallucinations subsided. By the time Berney met with her, even Maggie had gone, screaming at Morgan with her last breaths.
But zero hallucinations meant zero friends, and while Morgan knew the drugs were necessary, she felt self-conscious about the associated side effects, like weight gain. Her vision was blurry. Her hands shook. And she wondered if she was getting stupid.
Dr. Berney and other medical experts, including Morgan’s medical team at Winnebago, agreed that the hospital was no longer a therapeutic placement for her. She needed to be among her peers. She needed to socialize and forge emotional connections with people her own age. She needed to learn.
On February 1, 2018, Stacie Leutner waited for her turn through the metal detector at Waukesha County Courthouse, looking slightly annoyed. It was freezing outside, 10 degrees, and Bella had gone to school that day without a coat. Stacie worried about her.
During winters, adults in Wisconsin opted for ankle-length down coats that resembled sleeping bags, shuffling from their cars to office buildings like upright caterpillars. But teenagers like Bella cared about how they looked—girls fretted that a big, puffy coat might make them look fat, while boys worried it made them seem afraid of snow—even in freezing temperatures, it was typical for them to wear light jackets or no jackets at all. To showcase their outfits, they raced from their buses and cars into school, faces red from chill.
Stacie entered the courtroom and joined her small crowd of supporters—friends and relatives who wished to make their presence known to Bohren as he decided Morgan Geyser’s fate. She stood with her arms crossed over her down jacket, holding a second down jacket, which she occasionally gestured with for emphasis as she talked. While Joe chatted with the men in attendance about the upcoming “Sports Show” at the Wisconsin State Fairgrounds (five full days where “everything outdoors would be celebrated indoors”) the women crowded Stacie, asking if she’d heard of the Tide Pod challenge, an internet phenomenon later debunked as a hoax. “My kids don’t eat Tide Pods,” Stacie muttered. She wouldn’t look at Joe, who sat two rows ahead of her. Soon, they would divorce.
Stacie asked if anyone else would mind leaving the hearing to bring Bella’s coat to her at school. When one of the women warned that if Joe and Stacie kept doing everything for Bella, she’d never learn to do anything for herself, Stacie reminded everyone of how cold it was outside.
“There’s a point when natural consequences becomes unsafe.”
Across the aisle, Angie gritted her teeth against a gnawing stomachache that would turn out to be an ulcer. She struggled to sit up straight.
After someone finally agreed to take Bella her coat, Stacie sat down without looking at Angie, unable to quell her anger at the other mother. By then, Matt’s schizophrenia had become public knowledge, and given the family history, Stacie assumed that Angie had needed to be very repressed or delusional to ignore the possibility that Morgan was living with a mental illness prior to the attack.
Angie stared straight ahead, waiting for Morgan to be ushered in. She had never gotten used to seeing her daughter in chains.
In the hallway, Morgan waited with her hands and feet leashed to her waist. She had chosen her outfit carefully that day. The other women at Winnebago had promised that looking pretty helped in court. But Morgan never felt pretty. In general, she felt fat—and given the hospital’s sanction on physical activity, she could do nothing about it, save for starving herself, which did not interest her. Haircuts were one of the only things in Morgan’s life over which she retained any control. Every thirty days, a barber visited the ward. Morgan had layered her hair over and over, until there was little left.
When guards had slammed into Morgan’s bedroom before dawn that morning, Morgan had checked the mirror to make sure she looked all right. The night before, patients at Winnebago had done Morgan’s hair and makeup, helping her to select an outfit for the next day. Sleeping in her clothes and makeup had seemed like a good idea at the time, given how early Morgan needed to get up. But now her pants looked wrinkled, and her mascara was smudged. Yet Morgan hoped, in spite of everything, that Judge Bohren would think she looked nice.
When Morgan entered the courtroom, she and Angie made brief eye contact. Angie smiled, but Morgan didn’t, because Angie had told her not to. There were news cameras pointed at Morgan. Smiling was not a good look.
When Tony asked Bohren permission to remove Morgan’s shackles, Bohren deferred to the sheriff, who was seated just below him, and looked fast asleep.
At the word “Sheriff,” the sheriff’s eyes popped open in surprise. He jerked his head no at Tony’s request, placing a hand on his gun for emphasis. Morgan would remain shackled for the rest of the day.
Brooke Lundbohm was the first expert to be called to the stand. She detailed her meeting with Morgan and how she had “pushed back” against Morgan’s unrealistic goal of becoming a writer. Lundbohm recounted how Morgan had cried at this, which Lundbohm cited as concerning. Clearly, she said, Morgan was depressed, which meant she could be dangerous.
Surprised by Lundbohm’s finding, Tony pointed out that remorse was a positive indication, wasn’t it?
But Lundbohm said that “ideally” Morgan would be “able to get through an interview” without expressing so many feelings. She described Morgan’s depression as “complaining” and correlated sanity with “an absence of crying spells.” According to Lundbohm, Morgan’s inability to get through her day-to-day without feeling sad about what she’d done—“without having these moments where other people were noticing something is wrong”—indicated she was still dangerous. Lundbohm reminded the court of Morgan’s suicide attempt after returning to jail in 2015 and argued that because Morgan could not thrive in juvenile jail, she could not thrive in society. According to Lundbohm’s twelve-page report, Morgan was “not done processing painful memories.” She also testified that Morgan still heard Maggie, which was not true. In Lundbohm’s opinion, Morgan should remain in a locked hospital; she said that was not even “a close call.”
Tony seemed shocked by Lundbohm’s testimony. In earlier hearings, she had spoken in Morgan’s defense. But something about Morgan’s makeup and dreams of being a writer seemed to have pushed Lundbohm to side with the prosecution.
During his questioning of Lundbohm, Tony attacked her claim that Morgan still heard Maggie. He pointed out that Lundbohm had met with Morgan only once, nearly three months prior to that day’s hearing, and had never done any follow-up. “Are you aware that her treatment professionals, her social worker, indicate that the last time she heard voices was August—are you aware of that?”
“No,” Lundbohm said.
In response to Lundbohm’s assertion that Morgan had refused medication, Tony reminded the court that Morgan had always been compliant in taking her pills. The fact that she’d been denied medication for so many months wasn’t her fault. He also pointed out that Morgan’s self-harm in jail did not expose some inherent weakness in her character, because jail was not a therapeutic environment, wouldn’t Lundbohm agree?
The frazzled court reporter interrupted to ask Tony to please slow down. He spoke faster than most people from Wisconsin.
But Lundbohm heard him clearly, and shook her head at his questions. She maintained that Morgan’s mental illness made her inherently dangerous.
She said, “All of these symptoms are her.”
When Dr. Ken Robbins joined the hearing via video chat, Bohren boasted that Robbins’s testimony marked the first time that “this video system” had ever been used in Waukesha County Courthouse. In a friendly voice, he asked where Robbins was calling from.
“California,” Dr. Robbins said, prompting laughter in the courtroom. He might as well have been calling from the moon.
When it was his turn to speak, Robbins told the court that compared with the little girl he’d interviewed in 2014, the Morgan who sat before them today was a “dramatically different person.” He called Winnebago “a safe placement,” but not “an appropriate placement … in terms of her growth as a person and her continuing treatment.”
“Winnebago has done an excellent job of providing treatment for Morgan’s psychotic illness and they have kept her safe and the public safe for an extended period of time,” Robbins said. “But she has reached a point, in my view, now where her psychotic disorder is very well treated and her own personality has reemerged.” He described Morgan as an “empathic, kind, compassionate, bright young woman—and I don’t believe there’s anything that she would gain by remaining on an adult unit at Winnebago at this time.”
Morgan listened, rapt, unused to hearing positive descriptions of herself.
Robbins proceeded to remind the court of its obligation to release NGRI patients as soon as they had outgrown their hospital placement. He emphasized how important socialization was to someone like Morgan—that “the deficits that one can get with schizophrenia can be minimized with education and socialization,” neither of which was available to Morgan at Winnebago. “Morgan has reached a point where they don’t have the ability to provide her a standard schooling experience, a peer group to allow her to learn how to interact with, so there are some very basic and very important parts of adolescence that she’s missing out on by remaining at Winnebago.” Despite Morgan’s adult status, Robbins maintained that she would never fully mature if she continued to be deprived of peer-to-peer interaction, “because that’s really what adolescence is: learning how to be an adult.”
In reference to Lundbohm’s assessment that Morgan’s depression indicated some capacity for violence, Tony asked Dr. Robbins whether he thought there was anything “wrong” with Morgan being depressed, given her situation. Robbins responded that for someone who was compassionate and had empathy, feeling depressed after having stabbed a loved one was “something we would anticipate—it is normal.”
“I believe at the present time she is no more dangerous than any other adolescent her age.”
During cross-examination, prosecutors prefaced their questions to Dr. Robbins with sarcastic remarks, like “I was a little confused …” They focused their attention on Morgan’s high IQ, citing it as a potential risk factor, even implying that her above-average intelligence might have allowed her to trick Robbins into testifying on her behalf. “That IQ we talked about for her is borderline genius, right?”
Morgan’s IQ of 129 was not genius level. Still, the prosecution leveraged it as proof Morgan was capable of lying and trickery. They argued with Robbins that Morgan was surrounded by people and therefore had plenty of time to interact with peers, at which point Robbins gently reminded them that “peer” meant “same age group” and that Morgan was on an adult ward. After a long pause, the prosecution countered that Morgan’s depression made her dangerous. But Robbins explained that it only made Morgan a danger to herself.
“She’s a very bright young woman,” he said of Morgan’s IQ, and used this to reiterate his point that she had so much to gain, or lose, in terms of receiving an education.
To prove that Morgan was deviant, prosecutors cited her disciplinary infractions at Winnebago (without mentioning that Morgan had received said infractions for running in the hallway and standing up for a patient who was being bullied). They claimed that Morgan enjoyed internet access, which was not true, and that her time online likely afforded her the “social life” that Robbins was campaigning for. (At this, Morgan, who had not gone online since 2014, shot Tony a look, like “I wish.”)
Before ending his video chat testimony, Dr. Robbins reiterated that Morgan had been found not responsible for her actions, and that her schizophrenia symptoms, which had been the gateway to her crime, were no longer an issue. She had spent longer than two years at Winnebago and had adjusted well to medication. “With the treatment Morgan has received, her illness is dramatically better. Her psychotic symptoms are minimal. They’re now gone … Her behavior has been outstanding, particularly given her circumstances. She’s living on an adult forensic psychiatry unit. Where she’s in close contact day after day with ill, unstable people much older than she is. She has remained nonviolent, respectful and well-mannered … I think everyone has agreed that her lack of adolescent interaction has become an increasing problem with her advancing.”
After Robbins’s face disappeared from the monitor screen, Dr. Kent Berney took his oath and sat down at the witness stand. His pointy beard reached to the center of his chest.
Again, Morgan listened attentively as Berney described her in unexpectedly positive terms. Admittedly, his glowing assessment of her was couched in clinical language. But for Morgan, even a doctor’s saying, “I don’t believe she poses a substantial danger,” constituted a substantial compliment.
Berney challenged the state’s assertion that Morgan was some kind of evil “genius.” He explained that Morgan had taken those IQ tests long ago, and that, since then, psychosis and antipsychotics had impaired some of her cognitive functioning. During a much more recent test that measured attention and concentration, Morgan had generated a score that Berney described as being on the cusp between “impaired ability and borderline functioning.” According to Berney, Morgan had become “quite anxious and frustrated when she realized she was doing poorly—she began to cry, stating, ‘I used to be smart, I’m not anymore.’”
Unlike Lundbohm, Berney considered “all of this emotional content” to be “appropriate to context.” In other words, it made sense to him that after rousing from psychosis to find herself in a locked hospital with strange adults who spent a lot of time screaming, Morgan might at times sob and regret her past actions.
The state countered that Morgan had schizophrenia, and because schizophrenia did not go away, Morgan should remain institutionalized forever. Prosecutors reiterated that Morgan’s high IQ made her capable of tricking people, like Dr. Berney and everyone else who had testified in her defense.
Berney disagreed. Like Robbins’s, his final conclusion was that Morgan should be considered for conditional release. It was time for her to go home.
“You’re not sentencing a gang member,” Tony stated in his closing argument, reminding Judge Bohren that he was in “a unique position” to finally consider the “hereditary condition she’s cursed with.”
“You’ve seen Morgan grow up,” he said. “You’re still the gatekeeper.”
At the court’s instruction, Morgan rose to her feet to apologize to Bella’s family. The Leutners displayed no emotion at all—except for Joe, who looked away as Morgan spoke. Five years earlier, during a playdate at his house, he had once fixed her favorite necklace.
“I just want Bella and her family to know that I’m sorry,” Morgan said. “And I hope …” She trailed off, choking on her tears. “I hope she’s doing well.”
Angie caught Morgan’s eye and mouthed, “I love you.”
Bohren shuffled through papers and poured himself a glass of water before speaking into the microphone at his dais. “In looking at the case, we look at the nature of what happened—they were all twelve years old when it happened. But what we can’t forget is that it would have been murder if not for serendipity. Otherwise it would have been a murder case.”
Bohren told the courtroom that when it came down to it, he simply felt like there were too many “ifs” in the case of State v. Geyser—and the schizophrenia thing worried him especially. He described Morgan’s mental health as a kind of magical force, saying, “The stars have to be in align [sic] for it to work.”
Few had actually expected Bohren to release Morgan from Winnebago that very day. But when it came to determining the length of Morgan’s hospital commitment, there was good reason to believe he might be merciful. When sentencing violent offenders in the past, Bohren had been known to surprise people with his clemency; on December 23, 2014, during Morgan’s first Christmas in jail, Bohren had sentenced a man convicted of second-degree sexual assault of a child, child enticement sexual contact, and possession of drug paraphernalia, to ten years in prison, fifty-five years fewer than the maximum possible sentence.
“Now, as to the length of the commitment,” Bohren said, “I’m satisfied that she’s a fragile person—it sets the stage for repeat offenses—there’s more to it than just Miss Geyser. This is an issue of community protection.”
Bohren announced that Morgan would remain at Winnebago for up to forty years, the maximum sentence for someone found NGRI of attempted murder.
He called the decision “reasonable and fair.”
Without pausing, Tony whipped out the paperwork for an appeal and told Morgan to sign it. He handed Morgan a tissue. He patted her on the back.
She had known that it was possible she’d receive the maximum. But the fact of it shocked her. Her mouth hung open. She looked scared.
Behind them, Dianna handed out tissues to her family, while Angie sat there shaking. Per usual, they had expected the worst, but until that crucial moment they had also been allowed to hope that things might turn out differently. Morgan’s sentencing brought home the permanence of her absence. Forty years was simply overwhelming. How could they wait that long? In forty years, they might all be dead. Certainly Morgan’s grandparents would be.
Marsha Levick called forty years “absurdly long.” She pointed out that in Wisconsin, as in several other states, judges are elected, politicizing adult sentencing laws and putting pressure on officials such as Bohren to rule with public sentiment in mind.
Milwaukee attorney Frank Gimbel said it could have gone worse. “If they were African Americans and they were in a southern state,” he offered, the girls would have faced far more serious repercussions.
Following Morgan’s disposition hearing, Bohren’s former mentor, Alvin Eisenberg, talked to the press, expressing pleasure at Bohren’s decision: “He gave her forty years, didn’t he? Well, my God, I think that’s wonderful. I think the judge and I have similar ideas and values. We don’t need mentally ill people in society. People who do something for nonsense, it’s like a mad dog.”
As Morgan exited the courtroom that day, she wasn’t thinking about the years ahead of her or the reality of spending decades in Gordon Hall; she was obsessing over her smeared mascara, and how her hair hung in her face. Maybe if she’d done a better job on her makeup, Morgan thought, or had worn a different shirt, Bohren would have felt differently about her.
This was the plight of being fifteen: she had allowed herself to think the perfect outfit could rig the whole day in her favor.
But Morgan knew better than to feel sorry for herself. She thought of Bella attending school dances, glaring at her reflection in changing-room mirrors, trying on dresses that might cover her scars. Morgan touched her own scars, thin white bracelets on her wrists—they were on her ankles, too—the result of fidgeting through so many court hearings with her shackles pinched too tight, marking the passage of years like rings on a tree. Her scars were nothing compared with Bella’s, Morgan knew that—as far as she knew, the only thing they had in common anymore was that May 31, 2014, marked the worst day of their lives.
Yet to anyone who’d witnessed the crowd in the courtroom earlier that morning, Morgan and Bella’s similarities transcended the stabbing. Both girls had mothers who fretted about them, who showed up to support their daughters even when their daughters didn’t necessarily want it. Bella and Morgan were coming into their own, buoyed by dreams that other people might deem far-fetched; Bella wanted to be a doctor; Morgan wanted to be a writer. They were fifteen years old. Anything seemed possible. They were still young.
They were girls.